Regurgitatro

Its August.

I turn 30 this month.

I go back to Iraq this month.

These are strange times for me. Like fever dreams they seem wild and incalculable. Strange new artifacts claim significance while old familiar ones dissolve away. A cough, a well pronounced word in an empty room, dust rising from an old telephone as I slam the receiver home. Strange times. I wander the internet and the television wastelands to no avail. I purchase vice and bloat with culture wantonly. I am desensitized, I am oblivious, I am drunk. Pornography is a tool to let me sleep, alcohol is a tool to let me sleep, life is a tool to let me sleep. The accidental colors of a lampshade, the collected grime on a penny, my fate is intwined with the invisible and overlooked. I sleep in seedy hotel rooms deliberately. Lay down on the musty stained carpets pockmarked with cigarette burns. I lovingly run my fingers over the plastered-in holes and dents in the walls caressing the shoddy workmanship. My soul washes over this world now like bare feet in a dirty bar. Soiled toes that stick to a thousand untold stories remembered only by carmelized vodka and whiskey drinks left forgotten on the concrete. Dirty feet that dance drunkenly. Sickly and spasmodic, like hallucinations of perdition. I can hear them all calling to me. The dead moan my name. The voices only fall silent when the alcohol is in me. The screaming and whispering and conspiring and threatening only fades away when the alcohol is strong in me. My sanity clings to me like grease under a fingernail. My rational mind floats away from me like a baby’s head down a sewer pipe. I wander the streets at night on the verge of anything, as far as I can imagine, while powerlines crackle overhead in the humid summer air. I pick up empty soda cans and throw them down brick-walled alleyways. They rattle and clank emptily in the abandoned air. I kick over trash cans and smash beer bottles, I pull posters down and bend metal pipes, I hop fences and clamour on rooftops, I throw rocks into windows and dent the sides of parked cars. I drift through the night like leaves floating down a gutter. Ignored, unloved, unconscious. Not even the old thrills seem to keep me awake. Sweaty bar fights, graffiti, the heart pounding moments before another crime or another mission.. all forgotten. Lost. Lost and forgotten and then lost again. The food chain is not interrupted by my existence. Stray dogs throw understanding looks, bums sleep at ease as I pass, rats and roaches to not scurry underfoot, crickets to not interrupt their songs, moths do not tarry from the lights, bats do not break from the hunt. Cops do not stray from their donuts and coffee and hate, hookers do not stray from their streetcorners and blowjobs and vileness and confusion, junkies to not stray from their dumpsters and twitchings and justifications and denials.

I wake up sitting in traffic. Its nighttime. I’m lost. I look at a bleak and solitary landscape around me filled with drugs and despair. Fighting for inches, hating the man next to me just for being there then cutting him off in traffic for no reason, taking pleasure in it. I fumble through a downward spiral of radio stations while slowly floating down a stagnant river of red lights. The ball of worms starts crawling in my stomache. I pull into another anonymous hotel. Argue between languages with the night man then fork over the dirty bills. Dodging used syringes and the rainbows in greasy puddles on the way to my room. Two beds, one for fucking – the other for shooting up. I don’t know which to pick. I lay there listening to the buzz of neon lights and the muted conversations on the street below until unconsciousness overtakes me.

I wake up, throw my key in the box then walk back to my car. I stand there mesmerized by the ants crawling on a chunk of white cake on the ground. I am unable to move. Parylized and incapable of unlocking my car door. I stand there completely hypnotized as my mind is sucked into the ants and the cake. Just watching. Just watching the crawling ants and they remind me of something. There was something that they made me feel, but it was a unique kind of feel that only comes with certain kinds of thoughts. But what were the thoughts? What was I supposed to remember? Life burns in my eyes like battery acid for what feels like an eternity while the ants crawl on the chunk of white cake. I snap out of it and drive away.

I need food, I need grease. I pull into Norms and take my booth. I feel like I have descended into some level of hell. I order coffee and an omelette with hash browns. My first cup of coffee would be the last that my waitress would fill for me, I would have to brave the breakfast drome to get all my own refills. Fifty mumbled conversations and the relentless clank of forks and knives on plates nearly causes me to go insane. My omelette finally comes, thank god, bland and filled with eggshells. My hash browns are cold and unforgiving. Eating this food gives me the culinary satisfaction of picking at old flaky paint with my eyelids. I lean back and my mind drifts out of my body. Out past the mexicans that crowd around the stuffed animal crane-game, past the flourescent bubble letters painted on windows and storefronts, past the brown lawns where only weeds grow. I hum the lyrics to some unfinished rebel song as I drift off.

America, your water sucks me dry

America, your love makes me want to die

Knowing whats coming is burning me out inside. Burning until theres nothing left but the metal parts. Rust crumbling away from the old machinery. You make yourself a promise and then you break it and where does that leave you? Blown up in Iraq with a severed head. All the old memories come back to life. Dead men rise again and stare me in the eyes. Im all cleaned up now, fed, slept on a bed, but I’m still out there in the dust. Laying down in rotten food, crawling through the stink with the maggots, sweat and sun burning my tired eyes as I line up my sights. I’ve been gut shot by my own life and here I lie knowing whats coming.

The Devil: “Why ya’s goin’ back?”

Me: “Got to.”

The Devil (chuckles): “Got to huh? Ya know whats waitin for ya thur?”

Me: “Yeah.”

The Devil: “Ya know whats gonna happen when ya die?”

Me: “Yeah, I know.”

The Devil: “I can’t wait to watch you burn!”

Jesus: “You know son that all you have to do is ask for forgiveness and you shall have it and you shall ascend to the right hand of the..”

Me and The Devil (in unison): “SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU HIPPIE FAG!!”

With a fistfull of money or a mouthfull of shit we’re all just worm food in the end.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Related posts:

1. Iraq (The Movie) Part III: “This time its personal”
2. The White Plank
3. Necropolis
4. The Valley of the Shadow of Death (All Hail Moloch!)
5. Metamorphosis